Aligning Sales & Marketing with a Marketo-Pipedrive Integration

Background on Alphalyr

Zak: Can you start by telling us about Alphalyr?

Clemence: We are a Paris-based company with an analytics product targeted at eCommerce and retailers, primarily in the fashion industry. We take data from Google Analytics and other sources and turn those into summary reports to help our customers monitor their KPIs.

Zak: What is your role and key responsibilities?

Clemence: I lead our marketing team. I have a focus on lead generation, working closely with our SDR, and sales teams.

Zak: Can you walk us through your sales and marketing systems?

Clemence: Sure. We use Pipedrive as our CRM, both for our sales reps and SDRs. We use Pipedrive to manage our target account and contact database as well.

We use Marketo as our marketing automation, targeting campaigns to our database. We have lead scoring setup in Marketo, and once a lead reaches a certain lead score based on their demographic fit and behavior, we want to pass that lead to the SDRs for follow up.

Use case for integrating Marketo and Pipedrive

Zak: When we first spoke, you mentioned that when you initially added Marketo, your team didn't have an integration to Pipedrive, and this was causing us a lot of issues. What was happening?

Clemence: We would run into issues where we were sending emails aimed at acquiring new leads to people who were already talking to our SDR or sales team - because we didn’t have leads properly tagged or updated in Marketo. This wasn’t good for our brand image, and it made our sales team very frustrated!

We also found our Marketo data didn't update as sales would make database updates in Pipedrive. Which led us to have continual errors and pains with targeting to our Marketo database.

Zak: So what did you do?

Clemence: I spoke to our Marketo account rep, who recommended Bedrock Data as a way to get a rapidly implemented and affordable integration between Marketo and Pipedrive. We worked with the Bedrock Data product and team to get the integration quickly setup.

This sync is multi-directional which is important to us as our sales team adds leads to Pipedrive, so we need leads and contacts synced in both directions while avoiding duplicates. Once leads are qualified in Marketo, they sync to Pipedrive for our SDR teams to call into them, and the records remain in sync from that point forward.

As our sales team makes updates in Pipedrive, sync back to Marketo to keep contact and company data current. It ensures as we are marketing to our Marketo database, we are using the freshest data from our sales and SDR teams working in Pipedrive.

The Bedrock Data integration process

Zak: What was it like working with Bedrock Data to get your integration setup?

Clemence: For me as a marketer, it was the right balance of an online product we can use, supported by a team to get us rapidly on-boarded. The Bedrock Data on-boarding team worked with us to help us ensure the field mappings were correct between Marketo and Pipedrive, and test that the integration was working as we wanted it to.

Now that the integration is set up, we have access to the Bedrock Data to make adjustments. For example, if we added a new field to our contact record, I can add that via the Bedrock Data interface with the field mapping in a matter of minutes. Or if we change the rules for when we want leads pushed from Marketo to Pipedrive, we can make that adjustment at the click of a button.

Zak: What has this integration meant for you?

Clemence: It means our Marketo data is current, so we have the confidence of marketing to our marketing database without causing disruptions to opportunities being worked by our sales team. It also ensures our Marketo data is up-to-date based on changes our sales team is making to the records in Pipedrive.

The biggest thing though is we are now operating as one team -- with consistent data. Before the integration, we were acting as two separate teams. Now with Pipedrive and Marketo connected, we’re acting as one team.